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1968
1967 1968 1969 Events * London announces that it is withdrawing "East of Suez." British Empire is evaporating across Asia and Africa. * Paul Ehrlich pubishes The Population Bomb. * Gabriel Garcia Marquez publishes One Hundred Years of Solitude. * Eldridge Cleaver publishes Soul on Ice. * Saburo Ienaga 家永 三郎 publishes The Pacific War, 1931-1945. * Stanley Kubrick releases 2001: A Space Odyssey. * Lewis Yablonsky publishes The Hippie Trip, estimating the total population of Hippies in the U.S. at 200,000. * A Washington Square Journal survey reveals that 75% of NYU students havesmoked marijuana at least once. The typical NYU marijuana smoker is described as male, 20 or 21 years old, living off-campus and a social science major. * Republican U.S. presidential nominee Richard M. Nixon defeats Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Horatio Humphrey. Nixon promised to end the War in Vietnam while HHH waffled. Nixon lied. * U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) and Bureau of Drug Abuse Control (BDAC) are merged as the Bureau of Narcotics and and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). * U.S. Congress passes the Gun Control Act. THe IRS's Alocohol and Tobacco Tax Service is given responsibility for enforcement of Federal firearms laws. * China's population is 785.34 million. * Black People's Alliance is established in Britain. Timeline January * January: U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Ellsworth Bunker establishes the interagency Herbicide Policy Review Committee. * January 1: YIPPIE! * January 18: Eartha Kitt confronts Richard M. Nixon about Vietnam War and racism at a White House reception. Minor Texas Republican politician George H.W. Bush criticizes Eartha Kitt. One radio station bans her music. * January 29: The Vietcong launch the Tet Offensive against U.S. forces in Vietnam, a key turning point in the War in Vietnam. Percentages of the American public responding to pollsters that they support the war thereafter fall below the percentages of the American public responding that they oppose the war. Rather than accept responsibility for political and military incompetence conservatives blame the news media for a liberal bias. Classic populist scapegoating akin to the Nazi "stab in the back" lie gulls many less discerning Americans. February * February 1: Richard Milhouse Nixon officially enters the race for the Republican Party's presidential nomination. * February 1: Federal Hourly Minimum Wage is raised from $1.40 (1967) to $1.60 an hour. * February 8: Robert Kennedy advocates complete withdrawal of U.S. foces from Vietnam in a luncheon speech in Chicago. * February 8: Orangeburg Massacre. Police in Orangeburg, SC open fire on 200 civil rights protestors. Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith are kileld and 27 others are wounded. Henry Smith and Samuel Hammond were SCSU students; Delano Middleton, a local high school student, was 17 years old. * February 12: Darwin Day * February 27: In CBS News Special Report from Vietnam Walter Conkite speaks the truth when he says that it, "seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in stalemate." March * March 1: Student demonstration beginning at the Spanish Steps in Rome marches on the Faculty of Architecture and battles police. Rome is paralyzed. * March 6: 500 NYU students demonstrate the reappearance of Dow Chemical Company recruiters on campus. Dow Chemical was the principal manufacturer of napalm. * March 12: Anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy humiliates incumbent president Lydon Baines Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic Party Primary edlection. * March 16: American forces occupy the hamlets of My Lai and begin atrocity killing hundreds of civilian inhabitants, including women and children. Frustrated counterinsurgent forces descend into barbarism. * March 17: Demonstration against the War in Vietnam in Trafalgar Square. Also a riot. * March 31: Incumbent Democratic U.S. Presiddent Lyndon Baines Johnson announces that he will not run for re-election. * March 31: Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks at the Washington National Cathedral about economic issues as moral issues. April * April 4: Civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee. * April 6: 16 year old Black Panther Party militant Bobby Hurton is shot and killed by Oakland police. * April 15: Chicago Democratic Mayor Richard B. Daley criticizes Police Superintendent James Coslick's cautiopus handling of rioters following the assassiantion of Martin Luther King. He wanted a shoot to kill order given. * April 23: Demonstration and student strike at Columbia University. * April 27: Democratic Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey formally announces his candidacy for the Presidency. * April 28: Columbia University calls in police to end student strike--700 arrested, police rampage. May * May 10: Students in Paris erect barricades in continuing protests against the conservative Gaullist government. * May 10: Peace Talks between the U.S. and North Vietnam open in Paris. * May 13: French labor unions and parties of the Left call a general strike in Paris to join protesting students. 800,000 people participate. * May 14: Strike by workers at Renault-Cleon outside Rouen. * May 14: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issues memorandum starting COINTELPRO. June * June 5: Democratic Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy shot after winning the California Primary. He died the next day. July * July: American Indian Movement (AIM) founded. * July 26-September 23: Mexican university students clash with Mexican riot police in the Tlatelolco neighborhood of Mexico City. Thousands of students are arrested and a still unknown number are killed. August * August 8: Six African-Americans killed in riots outside the Republican national Convention in Miami, Florida. * August 9: Nagasaki repository for list of atomic bomb victims is completed. * August 20: The Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries invade Czechoslovakia to suppress political liberalization there. The Brezhnev Doctrine, calling for direct Soviet military involvement in the affairs of the nations of Eastern Europe, is declared in November. * August 22: 10,300 soldiers and 17,000 factory workers from the Beijing Revolutionary Committee and the Beijing Garrison Command reassert government control over Beijing's university campuses. * August 22-29: Chicago Democratic Party Convention, ABC News chooses the childish William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal as commentators. Buckley looses his temper with Vidal, saying, "Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in youy goddam face..." ** August 22: Dean Johnson, 17 year-old Sioux Indian from South Dakota, is shot dead by Chicago police on Wells Street. ** August 23: Yippies nominate Pigasus the pig as their presidential candidate at Civic Center plaza (located in the Loop and now known as the Daley Center). Seven Yippies plus the pig are arrested. Roughly 6,000 National Guardsman are mobilized and practice riot-control. ** August 24: MOBE conducts demonstration marshal training sessions in Lincoln Park. Women Strike for Peace holds a women-only picket at the Hilton Hotel, where many delegates are staying. At the 11 PM curfew, poet Allan Ginsberg, chanting, and musician Ed Sanders lead people out of the park. ** August 25: 800 particpate in MOBE's "Meet the Delegates" in Grant Park across from the Hilton Hotel. When 5,000 arrive to hear the MC-5 and local bands play police violence breaks out. Police reinforcements arrive and push the crowd into the street. ** August 26: Tom Hayden is among those arrested. 1,000 protesters march towards police headquarters at 11th and State. ** Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley formally opens the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Vioelve in Lincoln Park. street violence ensues. More reporters are attacked this night than at any other time during the week. ** August 27: Members of the American Friends Service Committee and other pacifist groups leave a near-northside church to march to the Amphitheatre, with marchers eventually numbering 1,000. Police stop the march at 39th and Halstead, about half-a-mile north of the Amphitheatre. This is the only march of Convention Week that gets anywhere near the Amphitheatre—it also gets virtually no publicity. Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale speaks in Lincoln Park. "Unbirthday Party for LBJ" convenes at the Chicago Coliseum: Ed Sanders, Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, Terry Southern, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Dick Gregory, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, and Rennie Davis. ** August 28: 10-15,000 gather at the old Grant Park bandshell for the MOBE's antiwar rally: Tom Dellinger, Dick Gregory, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Jerry Rubin, Carl Oglesby and Tom Hayden speak. ** August 29: Senator Eugene McCarthy addresses about 5,000 gathered in Grant Park. September * September 9: During a press conference, Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard B. Daley misspeaks ironically: "The policeman isn't there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder." * September 22: Daniel Cohn-Bendit is arested in Frankfort for crossing a police barrier at the Frankfurt Book Fair where Leopold Senghor is being presented with a peace prize. October * October: Number of U.S. troops in South Vietnam peaks at 540,000. * October 4: Abbie Hoffman is the first person arrested for violating goofy new law against defacing or defling the American flag when he wears a commercially made American flag tee-shirt. Arrest is amde outside the Cannon Office Building. Hoffman says, "The law I was arrested under would make everyone dressed as an Uncle Sam costume and most drum majorietes criminals." * October 18: U.S. Olympic runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos raisew their fists in Black Power salute in receiving their Olympic medals in Mexico City. November * November: Israel raids Beirut airport. * November 1: Film rating system using G, PG, R, and X adopted in the United States. * November 5: N.Y.C Shirley Chisholm becomes the first African-American woman elected to U.S. Congress. * November 11: A Yemeni Arab and two of his sons were arrested on charges of conspiracy to assassinate President-elect Richard Nixon. * November 12: U.S. Supreme Court strikes down on Arkansas Law permitting state public schools to teach Creationism rather than Evolution. * November 22: The Beatles release the White Album. * November 29: Hemispheric Conference to End the War in Vietnam is held in Montreal. December * December 2: President-elect Richard M. "Tricky Dick" Nixon announces Henry Kissinger as his National Security special assistant. * December 4: Three chapters of SDS, including NYU SDS, unite to disrupt a speech by Ambassador Nguyen Huu Chi (permanent observer for South Vietnam to the United Nations) at Loeb Student Center at NYU. NYU suspends SDS leader Robert Kirkman for his participation. * Deecember 4: Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and Party member Mark Clark killed by Chicago Police in an early morning raid on their West Side apartment. * December 9: Doug Engelbart demonstrates first computer mouse at Stanford. * December 12: Another nuclear test at Nevada Test Site. * December 30: Trygve Lie dies in Gello, Norway.